Politics & Power Quote by Edward Everett

The line lands like a velvet-gloved accusation: the Union didn’t drift into catastrophe; it was pushed by men performing rage as policy. Edward Everett, a patrician Whig-turned-Unionist statesman steeped in classical rhetoric, chooses “ferocious” and “frenzy” to do two things at once. He condemns the content of those pre-secession speeches, and he pathologizes the speakers themselves. “Under the influence” makes the venom sound less like argument than intoxication. Not conviction, not even strategy - a kind of political possession.

That’s not neutral description. It’s Everett’s attempt to strip Southern fire-eaters (and the Northern ultras who answered them) of the dignity of reasoned grievance. If your opponents are in a “real frenzy,” you don’t have to grant their logic; you only have to contain their damage. The subtext is a defense of moderation at a moment when moderation was being mocked as moral cowardice. Everett is insisting that rhetorical escalation isn’t just ugly; it’s a warning flare that the normal machinery of compromise has already melted down.

The context sharpens the point. The “very last session” before the Civil War was packed with threats, walkouts, and theatrical declarations of honor and sovereignty. Everett’s memory of it reads like an autopsy: Congress, the place designed for deliberation, became a stage for emotional mobilization. His sentence is also self-exculpation for the establishment class - a way of saying: we faced not a debate, but a contagion. In Everett’s hands, “frenzy” becomes both diagnosis and indictment, a reminder that civil wars often begin as performances that get taken literally.